A cap is a limit an advertiser places on how much of something it will accept from a single affiliate within a defined period — a number of leads, qualified conversions, first-time deposits, clicks or impressions per day, week or month.
Definition
A cap is a limit an advertiser places on how much of something it will accept from a single affiliate within a defined period — a number of leads, qualified conversions, first-time deposits, clicks or impressions per day, week or month. Once the cap is reached, further traffic is either not paid, redirected to another offer, or paused until the period resets.
Caps are one of the primary controls an advertiser uses to manage its acquisition: they keep spend inside budget, they spread traffic across many partners rather than letting one dominate, and they protect a newly launched brand whose support, payments and risk systems can only absorb so many new players at once before quality suffers.
From the affiliate's side, the cap is a hard ceiling on revenue from that offer, so it is negotiated up front alongside the payout. A cap that is too low throttles a campaign that could otherwise scale, and hitting a cap in the middle of the day wastes the fixed costs of creative testing and ad-account warm-up that were spent to reach that volume.
In context
Caps come in several shapes. A hard cap stops acceptance dead at the number; a soft cap keeps accepting but at a reduced rate or with a warning; a daily cap resets every 24 hours while a monthly cap is a running total.
Some advertisers apply caps per GEO or per traffic source rather than per affiliate. Affiliate managers commonly start a new partner on a deliberately low cap — say 50 FTDs a day — as a controlled test, then raise it in steps as the partner demonstrates clean player quality: good deposit-to-registration ratios, acceptable bonus-abuse rates and reasonable early retention.
Experienced affiliates plan around caps rather than fighting them. They run multiple offers so that when one caps out, budget and creatives shift to another; they ask for the cap schedule in writing so a mid-campaign change is not a surprise; and they treat a rising cap as the clearest signal that an advertiser values their traffic, often more telling than a small bump in commission rate.
Worked example
An advertiser onboards a new affiliate with a 50-FTD daily cap on a casino offer. After two weeks with a 68% deposit-to-registration ratio and a bonus-abuse rate under 4%, the affiliate manager raises the cap to 200 FTDs a day and adds a second GEO, roughly quadrupling the affiliate's revenue potential on that brand.
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